Short History of the Internet
[This article is reprinted, with modifications, from The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February, 1993). The author is
Bruce Sterling.] [taken from DIGIT magazine on culine.colorado.edu]
Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's
foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem.
How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a
nuclear war?
Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control
network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no
matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected,
its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact
of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable
network to tatters.
And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled?
Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an
obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of
the network would be the very first place to go.
RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy and
arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of
RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first
place, the network would have no central authority. Furthermore,
it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.
The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed
to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to
transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would
be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own
authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages
themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately
addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node
and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet
would wind its way through the network on an individual basis.
The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant.
Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be
tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in
the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place.
If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply
wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled
wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This
rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the
usual sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) -
but it would be extremely rugged.
During the 1960s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized,
blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around by
RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in
Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in
1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research
Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project
in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed
supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time).
These were valuable machines that were in real need of good solid
networking, for the sake of national research and development
projects.
In fall 1969, the first such node was installed at UCLA. By
December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network,
which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor.
The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-speed
transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely
from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and
researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-
distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was
precious in the early 1970s. In 1971 there were 15 nodes in
ARPANET; by 1972, 37 nodes. And it was good.
By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became
clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing
network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized
electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not
long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal
messages. Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on
projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright
gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts
on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses
for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for
person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic
about this particular service.
It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an
ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message
could be sent automatically to large numbers of network
subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists
was SF-LOVERS, for science fiction fans. Discussing science
fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned
upon by many ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't
stop it from happening.
Throughout the 1970s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized
structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate
computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate
many different kinds of machines. As long as individual machines
could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new,
anarchic network, their brand-names and even their ownership,
were irrelevant.
The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as
NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the
technique advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more
sophisticated standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission
Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the
source, then reassembles them back into messages at the
destination. IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing,
seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even
across multiple networks with multiple standards - not only
ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet, FDDI,
and X.25.
As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link
to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled,
at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and
became MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET
itself, though it was growing, became a smaller and smaller
neighborhood amid the vastly growing galaxy of other linked
machines.
As the 1970s and 1980s advanced, many very different social
groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It
was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of-
networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire
other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and
messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-
domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather
anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from
barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact,
nobody wanted to stop them from joining this branching complex
of networks, which came to be known as the Internet.
Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since
each node was independent and had to handle its own financing
and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like
the phone network, the computer network became steadily more
valuable as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and
resources.
A fax machine is valuable only if everybody else has a fax machine.
Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET, too, was
a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became an
utter necessity.
In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through
its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set
a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster,
shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded
and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. Other
agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the
Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy
in the Internet confederation.
The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up
into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones,
chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others
were grouped by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu,
com, org and net. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a
standard feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu
denoted governmental, military and educational institutions,
which were, of course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as
a high-tech research exercise in national security. Com, however,
stood for "commercial" institutions, which were soon bursting into
the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager
nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as gateways between
networks.)
ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its
own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for
ARPANET's functions not only continued but steadily improved.
The use of TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now
global. In 1971, a mere 21 years ago, there were only four nodes in
the ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of
nodes in the Internet, scattered over 42 countries, with more
coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million
people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks.
The Internet is especially popular among scientists and is probably
the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth
century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to
specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace
of scientific research enormously.
The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular,
almost ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster
than fax machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of
twenty percent a month. The number of "host" machines with
direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since
1988. The Internet is moving out of its original base in military and
research institutions into elementary and high schools, as well as
into public libraries and the commercial sector.
Why do people want to be "on the Internet?" One of the main
reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true,
modern, functional anarchy. There is no "Internet, Inc." There are
no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.
In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as
long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly
technical, not social or political. (There has been some struggle
over commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing
as businesses supply their own links).
The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike the
phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service. And unlike
most commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for access
time, either. In fact, the Internet itself, which doesn't even officially
exist as an entity, never charges for anything. Each group of
people accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine
and their own section of line.
The Internet's anarchy may seem strange or even unnatural, but
it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the
anarchy of the English language. Nobody rents English, and
nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you
to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use
you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies
to help you learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just
sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and
somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even.
Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting
and teaching English, "English" as an institution is public property,
a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English
be improved if the "The English Language, Inc." had a board of
directors and a chief executive officer, or a President and a
Congress? There'd probably be a lot fewer new words in English,
and a lot fewer new ideas.
People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own
institution. It's an institution that resists institutionalization. The
Internet belongs to everyone and to no one.
Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business people
want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government
people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it
dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it
spy-proof and secure. And so on and so on.
All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance today,
and the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical
condition. Once upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-
capacity lines were known as the Internet Backbone, and their
owners could rather lord it over the rest of the Internet; but today
there are backbones in Canada, Japan, and Europe, and even
privately owned commercial Internet backbones specially created
for carrying business traffic. Today, even privately owned desktop
computers can become Internet nodes. You can carry one under
your arm. Soon, perhaps, on your wrist.
The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like
bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore
for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000
and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network,
designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear
holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child, the Internet,
which is thoroughly out of control and spreading exponentially
through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of
the Internet in the 1990s resembles the spread of personal
computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more
important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those
personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that
is truly planetary in scale.
The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially
faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today,
with every manner of wild new commercial information- service
promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought
success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National
Research and Education Network, was approved by the US
Congress in 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the
Internet "backbone." NREN will be some fifty times faster than the
fastest network, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks
worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular
phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-
definition television. A multimedia global circus!
Or so it's hoped-and planned. The real Internet of the future may
bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning has never
seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development
of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance
to those original grim plans for RAND's post-holocaust command
grid. It's a fine and happy irony.